Agatha Christie's 'staggeringly beautiful' home provides an intriguing glimpse into her life, writes Hilary Macaskill in this extract from her book

BORN in Torquay, Agatha Christie remained faithful to Devon until her death in 1976. Not only did it give her refuge, it was also a source of inspiration for her novels. Practically all Devon's hills, according to Christie, were just the right shape.

In her writing she would occasionally slip in an admiring comment through a character. "Devon is so beautiful, those hills and the red cliffs," Vera Claythorne says in And Then There Were None.

Christie maintained a home in the county throughout her life. One of the most spectacular was Greenway, a Georgian mansion, partly screened by trees and wild gardens that tumble down to the River Dart. The property came into her family in 1938, when she noticed a house for sale, one she described as "a house my mother had always said, and I had thought also, was the most perfect of the various properties on the Dart".

She thought it would be fun to go and have a look. She may also have felt the pull of the garden and the boathouse, built on the spot where, it is said, Sir Walter Raleigh, smoking tobacco, had water thrown over him by a servant who thought he was on fire. Greenway was as lovely as Christie remembered, and her husband Max Mallowan thought the setting "idyllic". Christie asked the price, and was astonished by the answer, thinking she had misheard £16000 as £6000. But it really was £6000. She and Max drove away discussing it excitedly: "It's incredibly cheap," I said. "It's got 33 acres, it doesn't look in bad condition either, wants decorating, that's all."

Christie asked Guildford Bell, a young architect, to look over it. His advice was to pull down the Victorian back addition. It would, he said, be a far better, lighter house. So, on that advice, on October 28 1938, she bought Greenway. She was very involved with the alterations, taking particular interest in the bathrooms. She accompanied Bell on one expedition, saying, "I want a big bath and I need a ledge because I like to eat apples."

In 1940, while Mallowan was working in London, Christie spent most of her time at Greenway. She produced two books and several stories, undeterred by the encroachment of war. She wrote to her agent Edmund Cork: "A great deal of air activity here - bombs all round are whistling down!" For a while, Mallowan returned to Devon, where he joined the Home Guard in Brixham, and became interested in horticulture. He kept a book from 1941 to 1971 to note the camellias and other shrubs he planted - the "finest of all" a Magnolia campbellii he planted by the tennis court, "which, if February is mild, yields a thousand crimson blooms". It flourishes to this day.

In 1943, the house was requisitioned for use as officers' quarters for the US navy. Christie wrote to Mallowan, "I've put it out of my mind until the end of the war when you and I will go back together. Magnolias! Camellias! The river."

The occupation left no lasting damage (apart from 14 lavatories, which Christie had to do battle with the Admiralty to remove). And she was pleased with one addition - a frieze in the library, painted in dark blues and beiges. The Admiralty offered to paint it over, but Christie refused, saying it would be a historic memorial. Depicting all the places the flotilla went, starting at Key West and moving on through Sicily, it ended with "a slightly glorified exaggeration of the woods of Greenway and the house showing through the trees. Beyond that again is an exquisite nymph - a pin-up girl in the nude - which I have always supposed to represent the hopes at journey's end when the war was over."

Though Greenway became principally a summer holiday home, one thing Christie was serious about was the market garden she set up after the war. In 1952, she wrote to Cork: "The garden looks wonderful - all bursting with plants. It does look professional at last."

Christie took great pride in its achievements, entering the local flower and produce shows with gusto, and winning lots of prizes. One year, Greenway carried off so many prizes she instituted the Agatha Christie Cup for future years, which her gardeners could not enter, to give others a chance.

From the early days of Christie's residence, Greenway was known for its parties. The writer's grandson, Mathew Prichard, recalls "spirited arguments" between Christie and Peter Saunders (the theatre impresario and producer of The Mousetrap) on the plausibility of certain plots. "I remember Allen Lane of Penguin Books, who arrived in a Bentley coupé, and Billy Collins, with great big bushy eyebrows, arriving almost apologetically with a typescript under his arm which, like most publishers, he wanted back the day after tomorrow." It was, he says, the English country house at its best.

Saunders was a regular visitor. In his autobiography, he wrote, "There is a delightful informality about staying at Greenway House. The gong goes for breakfast but guests go down whenever they want. After breakfast, Agatha said, 'We do exactly what we like in this house. Most of us play cricket in the morning.' It seemed an odd pastime but it was for the benefit of her eight-year-old grandson. The house had a cricket net and we took turns in bowling at Mathew, excepting Agatha, who declared herself umpire. Every time he was out, Agatha called, 'No ball.'"

In 1959, Greenway was made over to Christie's daughter, Rosalind, who moved to the estate in 1968. After Christie's death in 1976, Rosalind carried on looking after her mother's work, always protecting her reputation and, on rare occasions, opening the house to her fans. In 2000, the house was given to the British National Trust. The locals, concerned about a constant stream of traffic along the narrow lanes, had their fears assuaged by the trust, which ruled visitors arriving by car could do so only by pre-booking.

Greenway's gardens were already well known, particularly for its camellias. Near the arch by the camellia garden is one of the oldest trees, a cork oak (Quercus suber) reckoned to be 300 to 350 years old. On Friday afternoons, one of the three gardeners (who work to keep the gardens "on the edge of wildness") leads tours through the restored vinery, past the old glass peach houses fronted by fig trees, up to the top lawn edged by a border of dahlias planted by Christie, and down to the river. There, in an arbour with a semicircular seat, she liked to sit and enjoy the view.

The house, too, would be familiar to Christie's readers. It appears, as Alderbury, in Five Little Pigs, but Dead Man's Folly could act as a guidebook for the estate. The lodge in the book is a small, white, one-storey building, set a little back from the road with a small railed garden round it - just as in real life. The layout, with a small sitting-room on the left of the front door leading to a big drawing-room, is that of Greenway. The paths meandering through the woodland gardens, utterly confusing for Poirot ("So many paths, and one is never sure where they lead. And trees, trees, trees"), are all identifiable.

After Rosalind's death in 2004, Mathew Prichard offered 5000 of the house's most important items to the National Trust, and nearly 5000 books. "There is no doubt we were a family of collectors and that I have inherited these attributes," Christie wrote in her autobiography. Her parents, she said, had a passion for china . When her grandmother came to live at Ashfield (the Devonshire house in which Christie was born), she brought her collection of Dresden and Capo di Monte with her. And these, together with the collections of Christie, Mallowan, Rosalind and Anthony, had all accumulated at Greenway.

Shortly before Greenway opened to the public for the first time, I went round the house with Prichard. In the library, he told how Rosalind's chair was positioned close to the fist-wide crack that ran from roof to ground. "Visitors would remark that it seemed to be getting wider. 'Nonsense,' she would say."

He remembers "the chair in the corner where my grandmother used to sit with her reading for the day, which was voluminous." The library was his favourite room. "It was where, after breakfast, life began."

Seeing Greenway in this unfinished state must have been poignant for Christie's grandson. But he was looking forward to the future. "It was a house full of people, and when people are running through it again, then I will be able to remember it well."

The intention is that Greenway should be a living house again, with afternoon teas in the kitchen, a holiday apartment to let on the top floor and "fine-dining experiences".

"It was not easy to make the decision," Prichard said. "We did so for one reason above all - stability. Greenway is a staggeringly beautiful place, and the Trust was the most likely catalyst to preserve and enhance that beauty for the public." - © Hilary Macaskill

ýAgatha Christie at Home by Hilary Macaskill is published by Frances Lincoln) ýThe Agatha Christie Festival is held on September 12-19 in the Devon towns of Torquay, Paignton and Brixham. See www.englishriviera.co.uk/agathachristie/festival